Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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That means 30 characters per second. So you're like sitting there watching a sentence like slowly emerge character by character as you're going online. But yeah, that's how we got online and we talked with each other. So you dial up to a local bulletin board. It'll be run by a person. Usually they have a computer or two sitting in their kitchen or something that's running the bulletin board.
And they have a small community of a few hundred users all competing to connect to that one phone line online. It was often busy and you couldn't get in, and the more popular wooden boards were hardest to get to. But you had all kinds of communities develop, and you could see there was the programming communities where people talked about programming. There was the news and events community.
I lived in the outskirts of Washington, D.C., so that was a big thing. But then there was the pirate community where they were sharing pirated Apple II games, and very different community ethos and mantras out there, but all... You know, all really nice and also very small.
These things, these wooden boards couldn't grow to the size of Facebook because your phone line couldn't take that many calls. And, you know, then later in the 1990s, the Internet, which had been fostered in these colleges, started opening up to the public and anybody could connect to it. And suddenly the world took on a life of its own.
It became much, much easier to reach a global audience faster.
Yeah, you know, it's been a funny transition for the game business. You know, Epic started out making shareware games distributed digitally. But, you know, as the first 3D games took off, like Wolfenstein and Doom from id Software, and then Unreal from us, took off, you know, to reach a huge audience of millions of users, we had to go into retail stores.
So we worked with a retail publisher, and they made a box, and they put CD-ROMs in the box, and... And then the world started transitioning back to digitally. And that transition didn't start well. The initial transition of gaming to digital was all bit torrent, all piracy.
And there are horror stories about games that would sell like 100,000 copies but have 2 million users because most people pirated it. And then Steam came along and introduced digital distribution and made digital distribution of legit games so convenient that most players moved away from piracy towards that.
And their practices were then followed by others, and the early digital industry took form.
Well, you know, one of the critical things that Epic always worked hard to do was to make something different that nobody else was doing and to try to satisfy a small audience rather than competing globally with the game juggernauts.
You know, back in the 1990s, Epic was new, but Electronic Arts and Activision and the other big publishers had been around for a decade, and they were huge companies that had giant retail distribution networks If I tried to make a game and then convince them to publish it, I doubt I could have had a chance.
And I doubt that even if I made a successful game, that I would have made much money from it, though they might have. And so the really unique angle to Epic then was shareware. And that was just the idea that if we distribute our game differently, then we can reach a much larger audience than these bigger competitors by virtue of this first episode of the game being free.
It was kind of the advent of what later became free-to-play. And the logic of that is just as true now as it was then. If the thing is free and anybody can get into it, then it's going to spread from friend to friend as people bring their real-world friends into the games they're playing and have the opportunity to build up a community around that.
So the other lesson there was minimize the friction of people getting into your game. Make it easy to get into and make it fun. I was very fortunate. ZZT was a funny game. It was not much like any other game. It had much worse graphics because it was all just text characters, smiley faces, and other Greek letters and things participating in this game simulation.
They were kind of iconic representations of characters rather than real ones. This was decades into the era. age of real graphical games with interesting graphics.
And so it wasn't even trying to compete in that area, but it was able to compete in a different area, which is that it wasn't just the three games that I'd made and shipped as a trilogy that were successful and drove the success of the product. It was the fact that I released an editor, and there's a whole community around it. And you see that trend has repeated itself. There was...
ZZT was one of it. Before that, there was Bill Budge's pinball construction set. That was a 1980s Apple game that let users build their own pinball tables. And since then, you've had some of the world's most successful games follow that path, like Minecraft. You can build your own stuff. Roblox. Fortnite Creative and Unreal Editor for Fortnite.
Games that become platforms for other people to build stuff was a real opportunity.
you know i think the big thing to realize as for indie developers right now is like there's massive massive competition in every major genre and so it's very unlikely unless you just happen to be the world's best at a particular thing that you're going to release a game in an existing highly competitive genre and when um a much better chance of success uh is in releasing something that hasn't been done before being really unique and reaching an audience even if
big or medium size or small, reaching an audience and becoming really popular with that, making some money from it and being able to reinvest and then expand towards your ultimate dream.
Showing 61–80 of 640 · page 4 of 32
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